Museums are changing. Many of them, with interactive installations, companion apps, and digital content, have gone through complete transformation over the years. New York’s Brooklyn Museum is at the forefront of this process. Their latest project, the ASK app, uses beacons to let visitors ask the staff about nearby exhibits. An ambitious project, months in the making, is coming to Android this week.
We sat down with Shelley Bernstein, Vice Director of Digital Engagement & Technology at Brooklyn Museum, to ask (pun intended) her about making museums digital and employing location context.
Why did Brooklyn Museum build ASK?
Shelley Bernstein: We had done some really forward thinking digital projects over the years. Visitors liked them, came to expect it from us, but there wasn’t a lot of consistency because programs were designed to run for a little while and then they were gone. We started to have meetings about what a digital program might look like if it was something available all the time. We started out with some goals, but we committed ourselves to letting visitors drive what would become the end product.
Did you learn anything new in the process about your patrons and about the technology? Maybe even about the museum itself?
In the content development stage, we designed a series of pilot projects to try and figure out more about visitor behavior and what they were seeking. In one pilot, we put staff on the floor just to see what visitors asked them. Turns out they wanted to have conversations about art and they wanted to know what to see next; conversations could be five minutes or more. Simply put, we found our visitors wanted conversation and they wanted a fully dynamic response that suited their needs very individually. We started to realize that a chat app that would allow direct access to our experts and could scale better than having staff on hand in every gallery. The beacons then let our staff of experts “see” which works of art a visitor is standing near.
And how do people like it? What are the reactions?
I think we’re the only five-star rated museum app in iTunes and the reviews have been really encouraging down to people remembering the names of the ASK team who answered their questions. Reviews are reiterating all those things we learned in early pilots including personal connection, specificity to their needs, and looking at art more closely. It’s pretty fantastic when someone says, “It was like finding Easter eggs!” in an app review.
Anything surprised you in the way Brooklyn Museum patrons engage with ASK?
It’s the funniest thing; they just don’t believe us when we tell them real people are going to answer their questions. It takes a few exchanges in the app and then you can see the light bulb go off; there’s this great “a ha” moment when they figure out what’s happening.
The stats, too, point to a deeply engaged audience. Conversations can last the entire duration of someone’s three hour visit and beacon data is showing us that 20% of our user base are asking questions in six or more galleries.
Does building a museum app make you think about an exhibition in a way people in tech view products? Can a museum be a product in this sense?
In this particular case, we reversed the formula. ASK is an app that is just as important to the Museum as its users because people using it have the ability to help us create a more responsive museum through their own dialog. As an example, we have three galleries—Egyptian, European, and American—that are re-opening this spring with a refreshed look and feel. All have been informed in some way by the thousands of questions visitors have been asking because curators have been regularly reviewing the conversations taking place via the app.
Does this mean you’re going to further iterate on the contents of exhibitions based on feedback received via conversations in the app?
Curators are looking at ASK conversations to see if the curatorial vision is being understood among audience. When the conversations show that tweaks can be made to make their visions clearer to the public, they’ve been all for it. Those may be small, incremental changes like re-thinking a work of art’s label text for clarity or message. In the case of these recent gallery refreshes it’s meant somewhat larger changes in how the space is installed. It’s pretty cool to think that visitor driven conversation is helping the institution learn about what’s working (and what isn’t) and what that can mean for a better visitor experience overall.
ASK is coming to Android this week. What’s in store for the future? More work with mobile and beacons?
The biggest thing we’ll be working on are optimizations for the ASK team and our curatorial staff. We’re going to start using beacon locations combined with image recognition to make the process of delivering what a visitor is looking at even more seamless. We’ll also be thinking about leveraging things like Elasticsearch to deliver better reports to curators, so they can more easily surface trends in the questions being asked about their objects.
What surprised us at Estimote, was how early museums started testing and adopting iBeacon. This technology was touted as the next big thing in retail and marketing but found a huge user base in culture sector. Why?
Museums have a lot of problems in common with retail; essentially, we want to be able to get people to product (in our case, that’s art) with as little friction as possible. Beacons solve a lot of problems because you can build quickly and experiment. From an infrastructure perspective, you don’t need to deal with wiring and power in what are often incredibly old buildings that don’t have easy ways to get cabling through walls. As an aside, we’ve seen so much demand within the industry for beacon projects that we open sourced all our mobile side code related to beacons, so that other institutions could build more quickly and easily.
Here in tech we like to think that we are important and we’re changing the world, be it retail, travel, or art. But how much do museums really think about technology? Is it just a side note for most organizations, or is tech core to the future of museums?
In recent years, we’ve been seeing institutions re-organizing structure to think about how technology can help foster an end-to-end visitor experience. Technology is becoming more core to what museums do and colleagues are being charged with taking a more holistic approach that closely follows mission-driven thinking. The outlook is a great one and pretty darn exciting!
Wojtek Borowicz, Community Evangelist at Estimote